Fifty years ago on 14 September 1976, nineteen-year-old Kieran Nugent from the Falls, Belfast, was the first republican sentenced under the British 'criminalisation' programme. Sentenced to three years he was taken to the H-Blocks where he was beaten for refusing to...

The national commemoration of the 1981 hunger strike was this year held in Ballina, County Mayo. Thousands took part in the march, with many onlookers and visitors applauding those remembering the hunger strikers of 1981 and the three hunger strikers from Mayo who...

Forty five years years after his death on hunger strike, republicans in Camlough, South Armagh, held a commemoration for Raymond McCreesh at his graveside on Sunday, 17th May. The guest speaker was former prisoner Jim Gibney who had liased with the hunger strikers in...

At the start of a commemoration to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, Sinn Féin MLA Danny Baker directed comments at unionist councillors on Belfast City Council. A week earlier, unionists criticised the erection of a statue of Bobby Sands...

The Bobby Sands Trust is saddened to hear of the death of poet, author and translator, Gabriel Rosenstock, at the age of 76. He was an indefatigable writer and one of the most significant figures in Irish-language literature. As President Connolly noted, he had an...

There was a huge turnout from republicans across Ireland to Leigue Cemetery, Ballina, Mayo, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Frank Stagg on hunger strike on 12 February 1976. At the same time, the Terence MacSwiney Committee based in London,...

Ciaran Quinn, Sinn Féin’s North American representative, reviews Laurence McKeown’s recently published memoir, And Flowers Grew Up Through the Concrete: A Prison Memoir 1981—1992. -oo0oo- THERE is a t-shirt in the Sinn Féin Shop in Dublin with a silhouette of the...

A well-known prison poem, ‘A Bright Star’, authorship attributed to Bobby Sands for many decades, was actually written by another blanket man, Tony ‘Scatter’ O’Hara from Derry, whose brother Patsy, an INLA Volunteer, died on the 1981 hunger strike. Back in 1980,...

‘2025 has been an important year for those who devour prison and former prisoner writings,’ says Eoghan ‘Gino’ Mac Cormaic who served fifteen years in jail, including five years on the blanket. In this feature he casts his eye over publications produced by former...